Dan C

Was just wondering if anyone's going to the PHP North West conference in Manchester this Saturday? Info here: http://phpnw.org.uk/ If so, give me a shout: http://twitter.com/dancryer or grab me at the conference, I look like this: http://twitter.com/account/profile_image/dancryer - Especially if you're looking for a job in Leeds!

The Fuji FinePix S5800 is great for macro shots... It has a macro mode, plus a super macro that lets you get down to 1cm away from the lens. They are very detailed indeed. It's an 8 megapixel camera. Cost is something like £130, which is pretty good for what it is!

I'm sure he'll feel suitably stupid when HTML is no more.

I drive a little black Y reg Fiesta 'Freestyle'. Pic from when I went out to play in the snow ( the hill is a LOT steeper than it looks ):

It's not quite correct. The idea to spec work is that the client provides their requirements, and you provide an explanation of your solution, where necessary containing very basic samples. I could write an RFT around my requirement for a content management system that allows any of my x thousand employees to edit content, but that must have workflow processes and be hosted externally, and follow our brand guidelines for design. They're usually pretty detailed specs. In return, I'd expect an explanation of how you'd set it up, what systems you'd use, where it would be hosted, how redundant the hosting is, who you'll be using, where your approach has been used before, etc. There is really very little point in doing spec work for small jobs, it really only makes sense for much bigger projects, where you wouldn't start until it was all specced anyway. I see it as a high risk, high reward work method, given that when you get the big projects - they tend to be well paid.

ClearType is only in the Windows version of Safari... and the only reason for that is so that it looks like the rest of Windows. OSX font rendering is actually far better than ClearType, it just doesn't look it when it's one app against a backdrop of different ones. ( For an example of that, try turning ClearType on and off a few times, letting your eyes adjust between changes... ClearType begins to look very blurry ).

Absolutely, PHP6 hasn't even hit feature freeze yet ( not even close ) so there's no guarantee it will look anything like it does now by the time it comes to release.

They've just posted on the Webkit blog that the GDI-based font rendering is starting to shape up and is almost fully functional in the latest nightlies - So i'd expect that they'll be using Windows native font rendering in the next release.

PHP5 is still the active version, PHP6 isn't even close to finished yet. 5.3 is due to go into beta around the beginning of May I believe.

It comes through the Apple Software Update program that gets installed with iTunes/Quicktime. It's an optional install though.

It doesn't implement other rendering engines, it just allows you to pretend to be another browser by setting the user agent. So if your bank for example says they don't allow Safari, you can pretend you're using IE7. They already have a web developer toolbar type tool, web inspector... It's lacking a few bits, but it is pretty good. Also headed towards Firebug with their "Drosera" tool, but that's not very good at all yet.

Request for tender work is usually only really worthwhile if it is a big client and a big project. For example, the company I work for submitted a request for tender to Microsoft and IBM, both of which gave us hundreds of pages of documentation as to their approach. The idea isn't that the customer tells you how it should work or how it should be done, just what they want - It's up to you to tell them how you'd approach the problem and provide a solution to fit that. I'd do it if it was big enough, but not for average joe and his SMB site.

There's a copy on my desk at work if you want to pick it up.

Don't make me think by Steve Krug is an awesome usability book I'd recommend every web designer/developer reads.

I don't feel that I skipped any points, I do think that to a degree there's a certain amount of crossed wires here. There are some of your points I don't disagree with at all. Microsoft Corporation (thus representative of Internet Explorer and MSN), Yahoo!, and Google are all active member organisations of the W3C. Additionally, there are four Microsoft employees and three Google employees in the W3C HTML Working Group and one or more people from both companies are members of the CSS working group. They're all very actively interested in improving these standards for everyone, including themselves. My point hasn't been just that clean markup is important, that's obviously a key factor and you're correct with that. My point has been that standards are also important, and they're not just some evil thing in the sky... They mostly just promote people doing things in a logical and clean way. I'm very much in agreement that I don't know Google's algorithm, nor do I want to. I can't say either way whether following standards helps with their specific search indexing - but I can say that in my experience, it absolutely helps - So I would imagine that retrieving useful information for them is much easier that way. You say that due to my not working for Google, I can't comment on these things... but yet you feel that you can authoritatively state that standards are not important? I don't think that's how it works. You didn't mention tag soup at all, I did, and the <em> and <strong> thing was an example of that. The reason for my mentioning tag soup is that it can happen with any markup. If you'd read the article behind the link, it talks about how browsers deal with the horrible mess that is lot of web sites on the internet today. I completely understood your point about divs and tables - When used properly, divs are of course the better solution. My argument in return was that given someone who does not know what they are doing, it is absolutely possible for someone to make just as bigger mess with divs, lists, and other "good" markup as they would with tables. Not everyone "gets it".